I argue that moral intuition serves as a reliable epistemic tool. However, reliability does not mean infallibility. Indeed, unchecked reliance on moral intuitions can lead to errors, because people are susceptible to influences such as cultural biases, irrationality, and prejudices. Therefore, the trustworthiness of moral intuitions hinges on our commitment to reflectively evaluating and refining them. To use moral intuition as a legitimate method of moral judgment, we need to cultivate these intuitions so that the outputs are just.
Framework for Evaluation
Moral intuitions are perceived by the subject as the immediate response that guides moral judgments without deliberate reasoning. It is employed as an epistemic tool to access immediate moral judgment.
People should trust an epistemic method if it can achieve its intended goal. Moral intuitions should be trusted if it is capable of consistently producing stable and dependable moral judgments. Empirically, the reliability of moral intuitions can be validated if the outputs of moral intuitions consistently align with the outputs of conscious, reasoned deliberation — the other epistemic method in accessing moral judgments.
Besides the empirical validation of such alignments, there are other criteria to judge whether an epistemic method is “in good working order” (Bengson). I’ll adopt these criteria to evaluate the trustworthiness of moral intuition..
Affirming the trustworthiness of an epistemic method is also a normative statement. Thus, it is necessary to consider the consequences of doing so. If individuals trust moral intuition in practical decision-making, their intuitions can collectively influence and shape social moral beliefs and cultural consciousness through social interactions, giving rise to shared moral understandings, norms, values, and rules. The shared moral senses reinforced in these societal practices ultimately perpetuate the individual intuitions again — this process is what Haidt calls a feedback loop. Consequently, the collective result can lead to broad, significant social impacts, such as the oppression of LGBTQ populations. Thus, affirming the validity of individual moral intuitions carries normative significance. Establishing “good reasons” to trust requires considering the normative implications — whether the moral judgments are just — and how effectively these intuitions correspond to fundamental moral principles that we reflectively endorse as a society.
This framework ensures that the intuitions can correctly fulfill and align with the moral goals with moral goals, and if moral intuition fulfills the expectation of this framework, it can be trusted.
Epistemic Considerations
In this section, I’ll use empirical evidence and philosophical arguments to show why moral intuition should be considered a legitimate epistemic method.
Alignment with Conscious Reasoning
The outputs of moral intuitions align with that of conscious reasoning. Moral intuition produces moral judgments that mostly align with conscious reasoning, proved empirically by moral psychologists. Joshua Greene’s research, using fMRI to scan people’s brain in moral decision-making process in dilemmas like the trolley program, reveals that while immediate moral intuitions might be driven by emotional responses, activated in regions such as the amygdala, they align with the decision reached through more deliberate, rational thinking, involved in areas like the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (Singer). The judgments produced when the prefrontal cortex is detected to be active converge with those when the amygdala is detected to be active.
This alignment can be explained by two moral psychological findings and a philosophical argument.
First, intuition can be seen as a summarization of different cognitive processes. As we encounter experiences in the world, the experiences elicit physical and rational responses; then, the brain compiles such responses into “tacit knowledge”, enabling the brain to make automatic judgments by spontaneously analyzing the current situations by drawing on patterns recognized from similar past experiences (Brock). This process, intuition, operates without the subject’s direct conscious deductive reasoning but doesn’t come from nowhere (Brock). The entire range of rational and emotional experience, shaped by our physical interactions with the world — an aspect of what cognitive science refers to as embodied cognition — underlies moral intuition (Brock). This process ensures that moral intuition is the automatic output of the underlying, largely unconscious set of interlinked moral concepts developed through our lived experiences; thus it is largely coherent with conscious reasoning.
Secondly, conscious reasoning frequently serves as a post-hoc explanation and justification for moral intuitions, like a lawyer defending a client. Jonathan Haidt’s Social Intuitionist Model (SIM) suggests that moral intuitions lay the groundwork for conscious reasoning. In the SIM model, people first have a moral intuition, and then employ conscious reasoning to justify and defend it when questioned (Haidt). Supporting Haidt’s model, the 2006 study “The Role of Conscious Reasoning and Intuition in Moral Judgment: Testing Three Principles of Harm” by Cushman, Young, and Hauser provides empirical evidence. This study involved asking participants to respond in a short period of time — intuitively — to three different moral dilemmas and then to review their judgments with more time — invoking conscious reasoning. The researchers found a consistent pattern across all scenarios that most participants justified their intuitive decisions rather than reassessing them: conscious reasoning did not lead to reevaluation of their intuition, but provided narrative and rationalizations that aligned with their initial intuitive responses.
Additionally, conscious reasoning itself sometimes draws on intuition. For example, when a subject exposed to utilitarian values justifies their decisions in dilemmas like the trolley problem, employing arguments such as they would pull the lever because sacrificing one life to save five maximizes the overall well-being, this justification rests on the utilitarian intuition that maximizing overall well-being is inherently valuable. This premise, while articulated through reasoned argument and serves as a foundation for the reasoned argument, is fundamentally an intuitive utilitarian belief. Thus moral intuition and conscious reasoning are not in binary opposition with each other but are integrated in the moral judging process.
Bengson’s Criteria
Moreover, moral intuition qualifies as a legitimate epistemic tool because it operates in “good working order”, a criterion articulated by John Bengson for evaluating the trustworthiness of epistemic methods. According to Bengson, for an epistemic method to be considered reliable, it must be 1) socially well-established, 2) deeply entrenched, 3) capable of sophisticated methods for critically evaluating its outputs, 4) engenders achievement, and 5) internally harmonious.
First and second, moral intuition is clearly socially well-established, for it has been long-standing in human experiences (Bengson). It’s also deeply entrenched because situations requiring immediate moral responses prevail in daily life.
Third, moral intuitions can be systemized into reflective equilibrium to examine if they would support each other; the systemized moral intuitions, or reflective equilibrium, can be critically refined and reevaluated (Bengson). Moral intuitions can also be evaluated by being compared to conscious reasoning, as proposed earlier.
Fourth, moral intuitions engender achievement in producing reliable moral judgments consistent with that of conscious reasoning. Its achievement is also its convenience — it doesn’t take long to respond, thus fulfilling people’s need for immediate moral responses (Bengson).
Fifth, moral intuitions are internally harmonious. An epistemic method is internally consistent if 1) the outputs are free from massive and systemic inconsistency and 2) these outputs exhibit coherent relations. Intersubjectively, there are widespread moral agreements on the fundamental moral principles, such as recreational harm being considered wrong across cultures, genders, and social classes. The coherence of moral intuition is demonstrated because 1) moral intuitions provide mutual support for one another, and 2) they can be gathered under sets of general moral principles. As proposed by Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory, most moral intuitions align with universal moral foundations of promoting justice, care, loyalty, and fairness. They serve as umbrellas under which more specific moral intuitions can be grouped and mutually support each other (Haidt). For example, in a community rally to support a vulnerable member who has been treated unfairly by an institution, the intuition to protect and care for those who are suffering is strengthened by the intuition to ensure justice and fairness, preventing exploitation and cheating.
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